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Comment by hidiegomariani | Hacker News Reader

Yes! I've just removed GA from one of my pet projects (shameless plug https://golang.cafe) - And started using Cloudflare NS https://www.cloudflare.com/dns/. Now I get users/analytics reports at DNS level. No bloated JS trackers, no privacy policies and weird stuff and I can track visits even when adblockers are enabled. This would definitely be overestimated as bots would be counted in but it seems pretty accurate so far! It also has unique users count (although this is overestimated)

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I think trying to estimate site visitor/visit statistics solely from DNS traffic would lead to very inaccurate results.

However, if you're using Cloudflare as a reverse proxy, those numbers are pretty much as accurate as you can get. Way more accurate than GA and other JavaScript-based solutions.

Correct me if I'm wrong but cloudflare only provides analytics for "proxied" records.

And for my experience proxied websites (in free plan) are way slower compare to bare websites, like 300ms latency vs 50ms latency.

Is this somehow different than what you get from hosting on Cloudflare Dash? I have my GitHub pages DNS through Dash and the only additional thing I wish I had was referrer analytics.

Nice site, too. Bookmarked :)

I assume you mean you are running the whole site through the cloudflare proxy, not just DNS. You cannot get that advanced of DNS metrics by just using them for DNS.

I use cloudflare as nameserver that effectively takes over all DNS queries for my domain

I get that, but you don't get more information than number of DNS queries - nothing about users

How does Cloudflare NS deal with caching resolvers?

It tells you even percentage and absolute number of cached dns queries. Cloudflare is dope!

I think he meant queries from caching nameservers that cloudflare does not control. I would argue the majority of queries would be fulfilled by these caching nameservers.

Setting a sufficiently low DNS TTL will take most caching servers out of the question.

Got it. It works for sites at certain amounts of traffic. Hugely popular might have more than one user per minute per dns resolver.

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